Billionaire Elon Musk's iconic rocket Starship, the largest and most powerful ever built and designed to send astronauts to the Moon, the Mars and beyond, exploded on Thursday during the spacecraft's first test flight.

Musk said that the next Starship test will be conducted in a few months.

Minutes after SpaceX congratulated itself on an "exciting first integrated flight test of Starship", the company tweeted that the rocket "experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation".

"With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today's test will help us improve Starship's reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary," SpaceX tweeted. "Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting first integrated flight test of Starship!"

At the three-minute mark, commentators indicated an issue with the test flight.

The rocket then began to flip for the separation stage and the rotating rocket was seen in the SpaceX livestream.

"This does not appear to be a nominal situation," the commentator stated after which the rocket exploded in the sky.

After a failed first attempt on Monday, where the liftoff of the giant rocket was called off just minutes ahead of the scheduled launch time due to a pressurization issue in the booster stage, there was great excitement for this launch.

According to reports, Elon Musk had been hesitant about the launch.

The SpaceX owner had warned ahead of the launch that technical issues were likely to play down expectations for the inaugural test flight.